“Thank you.”
“She was very kind to spend time with an old fart like me while you were at the office working on my trial. I enjoyed our time together.”
“As did she. She said you were a gentleman and a class act—the highest compliment she ever bestowed. I think you probably were the only client that she genuinely liked.”
Simon beams at this and for a moment he is transformed into the man I knew before the stroke. It fades too soon as his face collapses in the frustration of his thoughts. “I don’t understand it.”
“What’s that?”
“Here I am, sitting in this chair three-quarters of a century gone. I’ve done what I’m going to do. I will leave nothing behind me but money to be fought over. And yet your wife, half my age, is the one taken.”
“I don’t try to figure those things out anymore. I’ve learned that I’m not equipped for it.”
Simon nods in sympathy. “She certainly did love her animals, didn’t she?”
“Yes, she did.”
“You have them all now?”
“Actually, it’s more the other way around.”
Simon pours a small splash of wine into his glass, swirls, and inhales. “Not just yet. Don’t rush,” he says to himself and pours the
wine back into the decanter. “Will you be able to see any of Paris this trip? I’d love the company.”
David shakes his head. “Being back here…” David doesn’t finish his sentence. I believe he doesn’t know how.
“Of course. I forgot. You honeymooned with Helena here, yes?”
“And proposed, too.”
“It was insensitive of me to ask you to come.”
“Please don’t think that. It just shows me most clearly that I’ve still got a lot of work to do.” David taps his chest by his heart for emphasis.
Simon appears to be lost in some memory. “There was so much of Paris and the countryside I intended to show her. Did Helena ever tell you about L’Île aux Chiens?”
“It doesn’t sound familiar.”
“That was number one on our list, but I guess…”
“No, we never did make it back here.”
Simon smacks his forehead with the heel of his hand. “I’m so stupid sometimes,” he says as he pushes a small button on a control panel that I now see is hidden in the side of the table. A young woman immediately enters the room with a pad and pen in hand.
“Oui, Monsieur Dulac?”
Simon and his assistant speak briefly in French, and then she departs.
“Forgive me. I should’ve thought of this sooner.” Simon is suddenly more excited than he’s been the entire afternoon. “My driver will take us. We’ll bring the carafe. This stubborn wine will be ready by the time we get there.”
“But I—” David begins to protest.
“Do this thing with me. It would allow me to feel like I’ve made good on at least one promise, you understand?”
“Not really. You owe us nothing.”
“There are different types of promises and they impose different types of debts. Please, David.” Simon’s voice is almost child-like in the request.
“Is it that important to you?”
“It is. Yes, it is.”
In a small suburb north of Paris, Simon’s Maybach limousine pulls up to a gothic wrought-iron gate set within a long ivy-covered stone wall.
Simon’s driver, a large man who probably doubles as his bodyguard, quickly exits the car and removes a wheelchair from the trunk. While the driver helps Simon from the car, David wraps himself in his topcoat and wanders up to the gate.
The gate is a work of art. Interlocking angels of different shapes and sizes create a celestial panorama.
Just beyond the gate lies what appears to be a garden, now fallow in winter, and an old brick building.
David is still studying the gate’s artistry when Simon, with a picnic basket and blanket in his lap, wheels past him. Simon pushes his chair against the gate, which opens easily on well-oiled hinges, and then he passes through, signaling David to follow. David jogs to catch up to him.
An elderly groundskeeper in an even older woolen coat and cap emerges from the brick building carrying a shovel. He is the only other person in sight. The groundskeeper tips his cap to David and Simon and walks down a path through the garden. David and Simon follow a few yards behind.
From a crest in the path, I can see that it continues through a
cemetery at least an acre in size. There are rows of gravestones and small statues like the ones found in cemeteries almost anywhere in the world—including mine.
This cemetery, however, is different. All the statues are dogs.
David walks over to the first few gravestones as I look over his shoulder. The inscriptions on the gravestones are in French, but I can make some of them out. They are all about dogs loved and lost.
“L’Île aux Chiens?” David asks. “What does it mean?”
“Land of Dogs,” Simon answers. “That is what we call it here. It is also known as le Cimetière des Chiens.”
Many of the stones are very old with embedded images or aged black-and-white photos of the dog who lies beneath. A few of the graves have fresh flowers. A favorite food dish lies on one grave, and an unopened can of tennis balls presented with a bright red bow sits on another. Everywhere there are signs that someone once cared or still does.
David runs his fingers over the cut grooves in the gravestone nearest to him. His finger traces the image of the broad square face of a Newfoundland. The lengthy inscription on the stone is in French.
“What does it say?” David asks Simon.
“It’s a quotation. Sir Walter Scott, I believe. ‘I have sometimes thought of the final cause of dogs having such short lives, and I am quite satisfied it is in compassion to the human race; for if we suffer so much in losing a dog after an acquaintance of ten or twelve years, what would it be if they were to live double that time?’ ”
“Trust me,” David says quietly. “Grief doesn’t quite work that way.”
Simon leads David toward a bench under a large tree at the far
end of the cemetery. When they are settled, Simon carefully pours two glasses from the carafe and hands one to David. David sips the wine and I can see from the look on his face that it must be extraordinary. Simon is obviously pleased.
“To say it is the best I’ve ever tasted does not do justice,” David says.
Simon smiles at the compliment. “Now, tell me what you taste?”
David takes another sip and closes his eyes. “Let’s see. Chocolate… honey… smoke… peppercorns, I think.” Then David shoots Simon a confused look.
“You taste something else?”
“Yes. But I can’t place it. It’s not so much a flavor as a…”
“Feeling?” Simon offers.
“Do you taste it, too?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“I didn’t really know for many years. I couldn’t find it in any other wine and my father, who crafted it in secret, was long gone. And then after my stroke I tasted a glass of this wine again and suddenly it came to me.”
“What’s that?”
“This wine was grown in the soil of the year 1935. We had survived one world war and we were better for it. The winds were beginning to carry the hint of a greater darkness from another land. We were afraid, but we were confident. We would be able to overcome grief and whatever came to our borders. There would always be another summer, more light, a chance to seek and obtain forgiveness, another love. I think what you taste is the flavor of hope.”
Simon takes a soup bowl out of the picnic basket. He fills the bowl with a long splash of the precious wine and then hands the
dish to David. “Put it on the ground over by that tree.” Simon points to a large elm.
“Say again?”
Simon laughs at the confused look on David’s face. “Just do it. You’ll see.”
David shrugs and complies.
By the time David returns to his seat, I’m amazed to see that feral cats have emerged from every direction of the cemetery—out of the bushes, over the stone wall, from behind trees and gravestones. The cats, oblivious to David’s presence, head toward the bowl. Soon five are jockeying for position to get a few laps of the wine. Others quickly join around the bowl.
David watches in amazement. “Only in Paris. Cats that like wine.”
Simon shakes his head. “I don’t think they drink it because they enjoy fermented grapes. I think they taste the feeling that you do. But who’s to say for sure?”
As one cat is satiated, it moves off to make room for others. Soon the wine is gone, but the cats don’t leave. Instead, they silently take up positions on the various graves and statues. Some clean themselves; others stretch and bask in the winter sun. The cats have no fear of David or Simon and act as if they’ve come here to rest on these graves for generations.
“So much life among the dead,” Simon says quietly.
“Here, perhaps, but not everywhere.”
Simon shakes his head. “Don’t make my mistakes.”
“Which mistakes are those?”
“Pessimism, cynicism, fear. They will only lead you to a very small life.”
I can still remember my last dinner with Simon. He was talking
about losing his parents to the ravages of their despair following World War II.
“I was raised to believe that God speaks in the language of sacrifice,” he told me. “You are expected to sacrifice because it is the measure of the depth of your belief. That is the God of Abraham and Isaac, of Job and of David.”
“And now?” I’d asked him.
“I’ve seen too much sacrifice to believe that God is behind all of it, and I’ve seen sacrifice that has no indicia of the hand of God at all. Loss is not always part of some greater plan explainable by reference to the actions of a divine being with a divine purpose.”
“That’s not too comforting, is it?”
“No. Sometimes events that leave us bereft of anything but grief just happen for no reason other than happenstance—a car turns left instead of right, a train is missed, a call comes too late—and the real test of our humanness is whether, in light of that knowledge, we ever are able to recover. When we again find our way despite the inability to manufacture a deeper meaning in our suffering, that I think is when God smiles upon us, proud of the strength of his creation. Sacrifice today has become a crutch of the persecuted, an excuse to remain powerless. I can’t imagine that this is how God would communicate to his children.”
“So then how does God speak?” I challenged him.
“I know it is presumptuous of me, but I think God’s language is juxtaposition. His—or her—voice is heard most clearly in the reconciliation of the contradictions and contrasts of life. God lives in the peaks and the valleys, the jarring transitions, not in the mundane, the safe, the smooth, or the repetitive. But that means there must be at least a certain amount of dissonance. Without dissonance, there is no need of belief, and without belief there surely is no God.”
“I think you lost me,” I’d said.
“Somewhere along the way, Helena, my life became very small. I worked so hard to eliminate the conflict—the fear, the tension, and yes, even the pain—that there was nothing left to force contrast and distinction. Belief—faith, if you will—was no longer necessary. And now I see, perhaps too late, that there isn’t much God left in my life. I don’t think that’s coincidence. It frightens me.”
“It’s never too late,” I told him with an optimism I subsequently lost in the excruciating days following my double mastectomy.
From across the table, Simon reached for my hand and kissed it.
Now, in response to Simon’s caution, David says, “I believe those cards have already been dealt.”
“It’s never too late, my friend.” Simon repeats my own yellowed and cobwebbed words to my husband.
David is so focused on Simon that he doesn’t hear the groundskeeper approach until he is almost upon them. The groundskeeper points to the cats and says something to David in French. David looks to Simon for translation.
“Philippe says that God’s countenance must have shined upon these dogs in life because now he sends his angels to watch over them in death.”
The groundskeeper points up into the sky and then, using his thumb and index finger, pushes his lips into a smile. “God… smiles,
oui
?” he says, and then tips his cap to David and Simon before moving on.
I lean over the wineglass in David’s hand. I’m only inches from him now. I know I can’t taste the wine, but some small part of me thinks that I might be able to sense its aroma. I want to know whether the dead can recognize hope.
David raises his face upward to the sky. The curious look on his face reminds me of my dogs when they sense something odd on the wind. “Helena?” David whispers.
At the sound of my name, Simon steals a sideways glance at his lawyer and smiles. I wonder: Was this the debt you really were trying to pay, Simon?
But too soon David’s eyes cloud over with doubt. The moment between us is spent. Simon’s gift, if that is what it really was, is defeated.
“I’d better get going,” David says and rises from the bench.
Simon dropped David off at his hotel with many promises extracted for a longer visit in the early spring. Before he drove away, Simon gave David one last sentence of advice: “Don’t live small.”
David was scheduled to take the flight back from Paris that evening. My husband is many things, but spontaneous generally isn’t one of them. So, when I hear David change his flight to the following day, I’m more than a little surprised. I watch him shower and put on a fresh shirt. When he catches his reflection in the mirror, he says to himself, “Are you ready?” I follow him out of the hotel and onto the streets of Paris.
David hails a taxi. As I hear him tell the driver the destination, it finally occurs to me what he’s doing. We stare out the window of the taxi as it winds through the streets of Paris. His eyes are half closed and he hunches his shoulders against the jarring pain of memories recalled.
The taxi pulls up in front of the gates of le Jardin des Tuileries. David pays the driver and walks across the expansive gardens to a small bronze statue now half obscured by a bush that wasn’t there last time.
The statue is of le Chat Botté—Puss-in-Boots—Perrault’s clever feline.
David proposed to me at this statue.
When we got back to the States, I asked him why he picked the gardens and why that statue. It was such an ideal choice for me. I’d always loved the story of the cat who was able to speak and thereby both save himself and transform the life of his human counterpart. I also thought the image of the little cat in his oversize boots and plumed hat was too cute for words.